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attackfishDo authors pay enough attention to the practical constraints of their created worlds when describing what their characters are eating? Does anyone want a bug butter sandwich - or vat meat?
Is it wrong that one of my first thoughts upon reading this description was all of those magnificent feasts in the Redwall books by Brian Jacques? Once upon a time, these feasts caused little me a great deal of consternation and longing, because while my elementary school teacher was reading those books to us, my immune disease was forcing me to subsist on turkey, rice, scallions, and grapes. I was also terribly hungry all the time then, because I was busy growing nine inches in one year, after which I was still one of the shortest kids in the class. So those lurid descriptions of piles of wonderful food made quite the impression on little me.
I love food. And I know my food. I’m a very good cook, or so I hear tell, and I’m notorious among my friends for always knowing the best restaurant in town for ny given genre of food. My childhood unable to eat almost anything left me an extremely adventurous eater, and barring things I’m allergic to, I will try almost anything once. More relevant to this topic, and to Redwall, I know what goes into what, because thats what keeps me from eating anything I’m allergic to. Even at ten years old, when I was not the most inclined to thinking worldbuilding through, I noticed that a whole lot of the food at the Redwall feasts needed milk, cream, or butter, or eggs, which compels the question, where did our abbey mice get such things? Do they have a pasture somewhere with cows that they tend to (and am I the only one imagining green habit attired mice clinging to a cow’s udder, trying to milk it?) is it milk from the lady rodents themselves? Some of the food could be made with chemical substitutes, but do our utopian low tech woodland creatures have a full industrial chemical laboratory beneath Cavern Hole? And what are the ethics of eating eggs when birds can think and talk just like the abbey creatures?
Then there are books where I just can’t figure out where any of the food comes from at all. In Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, for example. When Tally and Shay leave the settlements and go zooming across the countryside, there is no visible agriculture. The population is deliberately kept stupid, docile, and less than productive. I can’t figure out how most jobs necessary for society to function at a basic material level are performed, much less food.
This question seems more relevant, at first glance, to Science Fiction than to Fantasy, because after all, most fantasy either exists in an expressly agrarian society, or takes place in a modern city. The means of food production don’t need to be spelled out, because they’re apparent at first glance. There are still things that should have been thought through, such as the Redwall example, or foods eaten wildly out of season, or crops unsuited to a climate, that sort of thing, though, and in Fantasy, it’s usually forgotten. Food doesn’t matter until it gets to the table and can be an expression of culture or personality. Discussions of food in fantasy often revolve around how it can add realism to a narrative, how taste and smell should be added to descriptions of a world. Sight and sound, the senses most often used, can be appreciated at a distance, but taste is visceral. It is literally in your face.
In Science Fiction, the “where does the food come from” question can be much more blatant. Depending on the environment involved, food might have to be shipped in at great expense, or manufactured artificially. The stereotype from the middle of the last century is the food pill. There’s alien cuisine to be considered. There’s what foods a character might miss in any situation that takes them away from those foods.
The description of this topic mentions types of artificial food and asks the question of whether anyone would want to eat it, which I think is a strange question to ask, and completely beside the point, given that in most cases, writers don’t want us to look at artificial food and think “ooh yummy.” As to whether it would be realistic for characters to eat it, I can safely say that my own childhood food experiences and the ability I possess to imagine what it is like to be desperately poor and hungry have convinced me that if it’s what’s available, that’s what humans will eat. Turkey, rice, scallions, and grapes got very boring very quickly. I came to hate the sight of all four, yet every day I ate them without even salt, because they were all I could eat, and I had a body to fuel. Starving people the world over probably ate their usually monotonous diets more enthusiastically than I did, because hunger really is the best sauce, and I was fortunate to know that I would always have three meals to look forward to. Enjoyment doesn’t enter into it.
Part of the reason, I think, for the above pointless question is that many, but certainly not all of us, though probably a healthy majority of the people sitting around talking about food in Speculative Fiction at a convention, in the modern developed world are lucky enough to never know true hunger. When food is always available, and in wide variety, and always has been for a person, enjoyment is one of the only questions about food left. We’re free to choose our food based on what we feel like eating.
Equally important to why so often in Science Fiction I can’t figure out where any food comes from is that in the modern developed world city dwellers and suburbanites, rich, poor, hungry, or well fed are also by and large isolated from the means of our food’s production. It’s easy to forget that food doesn’t just come from the restaurant and the grocery store, and since we take it for granted, it’s easy to forget about in worldbuilding. This raises the question whether this is important in some way outside of simply telling a good story. Is our societal tendency to forget about food until it’s in the kitchen or on the table somehow going to lead to the kinds of failures of imagination that could harm us in the real world? Or is food in Speculative Fiction one more thing that some writers pay attention to and others don’t or in different ways?
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bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic adapted from a panel at the 2012 Chicon, the text of which is quoted at the beginning of this post.
Is it wrong that one of my first thoughts upon reading this description was all of those magnificent feasts in the Redwall books by Brian Jacques? Once upon a time, these feasts caused little me a great deal of consternation and longing, because while my elementary school teacher was reading those books to us, my immune disease was forcing me to subsist on turkey, rice, scallions, and grapes. I was also terribly hungry all the time then, because I was busy growing nine inches in one year, after which I was still one of the shortest kids in the class. So those lurid descriptions of piles of wonderful food made quite the impression on little me.
I love food. And I know my food. I’m a very good cook, or so I hear tell, and I’m notorious among my friends for always knowing the best restaurant in town for ny given genre of food. My childhood unable to eat almost anything left me an extremely adventurous eater, and barring things I’m allergic to, I will try almost anything once. More relevant to this topic, and to Redwall, I know what goes into what, because thats what keeps me from eating anything I’m allergic to. Even at ten years old, when I was not the most inclined to thinking worldbuilding through, I noticed that a whole lot of the food at the Redwall feasts needed milk, cream, or butter, or eggs, which compels the question, where did our abbey mice get such things? Do they have a pasture somewhere with cows that they tend to (and am I the only one imagining green habit attired mice clinging to a cow’s udder, trying to milk it?) is it milk from the lady rodents themselves? Some of the food could be made with chemical substitutes, but do our utopian low tech woodland creatures have a full industrial chemical laboratory beneath Cavern Hole? And what are the ethics of eating eggs when birds can think and talk just like the abbey creatures?
Then there are books where I just can’t figure out where any of the food comes from at all. In Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, for example. When Tally and Shay leave the settlements and go zooming across the countryside, there is no visible agriculture. The population is deliberately kept stupid, docile, and less than productive. I can’t figure out how most jobs necessary for society to function at a basic material level are performed, much less food.
This question seems more relevant, at first glance, to Science Fiction than to Fantasy, because after all, most fantasy either exists in an expressly agrarian society, or takes place in a modern city. The means of food production don’t need to be spelled out, because they’re apparent at first glance. There are still things that should have been thought through, such as the Redwall example, or foods eaten wildly out of season, or crops unsuited to a climate, that sort of thing, though, and in Fantasy, it’s usually forgotten. Food doesn’t matter until it gets to the table and can be an expression of culture or personality. Discussions of food in fantasy often revolve around how it can add realism to a narrative, how taste and smell should be added to descriptions of a world. Sight and sound, the senses most often used, can be appreciated at a distance, but taste is visceral. It is literally in your face.
In Science Fiction, the “where does the food come from” question can be much more blatant. Depending on the environment involved, food might have to be shipped in at great expense, or manufactured artificially. The stereotype from the middle of the last century is the food pill. There’s alien cuisine to be considered. There’s what foods a character might miss in any situation that takes them away from those foods.
The description of this topic mentions types of artificial food and asks the question of whether anyone would want to eat it, which I think is a strange question to ask, and completely beside the point, given that in most cases, writers don’t want us to look at artificial food and think “ooh yummy.” As to whether it would be realistic for characters to eat it, I can safely say that my own childhood food experiences and the ability I possess to imagine what it is like to be desperately poor and hungry have convinced me that if it’s what’s available, that’s what humans will eat. Turkey, rice, scallions, and grapes got very boring very quickly. I came to hate the sight of all four, yet every day I ate them without even salt, because they were all I could eat, and I had a body to fuel. Starving people the world over probably ate their usually monotonous diets more enthusiastically than I did, because hunger really is the best sauce, and I was fortunate to know that I would always have three meals to look forward to. Enjoyment doesn’t enter into it.
Part of the reason, I think, for the above pointless question is that many, but certainly not all of us, though probably a healthy majority of the people sitting around talking about food in Speculative Fiction at a convention, in the modern developed world are lucky enough to never know true hunger. When food is always available, and in wide variety, and always has been for a person, enjoyment is one of the only questions about food left. We’re free to choose our food based on what we feel like eating.
Equally important to why so often in Science Fiction I can’t figure out where any food comes from is that in the modern developed world city dwellers and suburbanites, rich, poor, hungry, or well fed are also by and large isolated from the means of our food’s production. It’s easy to forget that food doesn’t just come from the restaurant and the grocery store, and since we take it for granted, it’s easy to forget about in worldbuilding. This raises the question whether this is important in some way outside of simply telling a good story. Is our societal tendency to forget about food until it’s in the kitchen or on the table somehow going to lead to the kinds of failures of imagination that could harm us in the real world? Or is food in Speculative Fiction one more thing that some writers pay attention to and others don’t or in different ways?
Written for
bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic adapted from a panel at the 2012 Chicon, the text of which is quoted at the beginning of this post.
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 11:34 pm (UTC)Interestingly enough, the fantasy story that I sold this spring was completely stalled out until I realized that my worldbuilding of the culture's means of production was completely inadequate -- all I had in mind was the vague idea that it was a fishing village, but the story was going nowhere until I actually sat down and figured out what they caught, how they caught it, and how the catch was divided between commercially viable fish and the ones that were used at home. Then all of a sudden the rest of the story fell into place.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-25 02:34 am (UTC)It doesn't help that I've been thinking more about this than usual, because in my current novel, one of the main countries keeps getting conquered because it's a breadbasket. And I'm writing a White Collar AU where after a global food and energy collapse (and population collapse), the world turns to extensive slave labor, most of which is involved in food production.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 08:52 pm (UTC)There's also the impact that cultivating food would have on a region and a civilization. The Lands of Ice and Mice, for instance, devotes a great deal of its worldbuilding (http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=5356071&postcount=18) to explaining the hows and whys of an alternate version of the Inuit/Thule developing agricultural: what native plants they might cultivate, how they could do it, what affect that would have on their civilization, how it would alter the landscape over centuries. The sort of stuff you don't need to worry about if you're doing a generic pseudo-European fantasy setting.
Fantasy-wise, magic can also impact agricultural production, and thus a whole lot of other things. There's this online steampunk novel, The Dead Isle (http://theoriginalsam.livejournal.com/24703.html), where there's a bit where we learn that their version of America never had mass slavery. There was no economic need for it, as magic had made automated harvesters/planters/gins/whathaveyou possible for centuries.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 10:34 pm (UTC)*is utterly fascinated by this AH, sets down to read*
Copperbadge manages to share two fandoms with me, and some of the first really good fic I read was his Harry Potter stuff. Reading Ellis Graveworthy as something other than a Wizarding author who slept with a young Sirius Black is a little surreal.
Argh, why is it that any time you try to link me to the Alternate History site, Livejournal makes me fish the comment out of
no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 10:53 pm (UTC)For general worldbuilding, it's hard to beat B_Munro (http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=158644). He posts write-ups trying to imagine the wider world of certain pop cultural stories, such as Sliders, Star Trek, Independence Day, or their futures. Like his write-ups of 2012 (http://QuantumBranching.deviantart.com/art/2012-The-Movie-much-later-263304825), or the future (http://QuantumBranching.deviantart.com/art/Thor-Meets-Captain-America-15-years-onwards-322442264) of the short story "Captain America Meets Thor." (Original short story here (http://www.davidbrin.com/thor1.htm).) You can find a lot of his scenarios and maps on deviantArt (http://quantumbranching.deviantart.com/gallery/).
I think it's all the links. LJ thinks it's spam.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 11:20 pm (UTC)You managed to list five fandoms that leave me completely cold there. Part of it is that aside from Harry Potter and Brimstone, I mostly stick to secondary world fantasy, police procedural, and anything Scott Westerfeld writes.
They have a list of places that are approved automatically as nonspam, and the only nonspam links I tend to get are from AH.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-25 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-25 02:40 pm (UTC)Externally, of course, it makes sense to do things that way, the things that the YA audience wants to eat are unavailable, but the things they have to suffer through in our world make up the bulk of poor Katniss's diet... Well.
And given the popularity of the books, is this all something that's only ever going to bother an insignificant subset of overly picky readers, and we should stop acting like writers should have to think every last bit of this through?
Nah.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-25 03:50 pm (UTC)Haha, agreed. And to elaborate a bit, I guess it comes down to the eternal choice between quick gratification and lasting achievement. I could tell from the time I was listening to THG that I wasn't looking at a classic. The details of worldbuilding slipped by me but mostly because I didn't care that much, and the writing wasn't very good. Slapping out a book without putting much thought into the crafting makes sense for commercial fiction, and if that's what the author wants to do I think it's a valid choice. Those writers who want to put out something that lasts, though, better put in the research and craft to achieve that goal.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-25 04:18 pm (UTC)I always say I read for the characters (and the politics!) but that's not entirely true. If the worldbuilding is too weak, it will throw me out of the story , and then I won't get to enjoy my characters. And the way the worldbuilding doesn't work in Harry Potter is making it very difficult for me to write AU fic for it.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-26 08:56 am (UTC)I have a SUPER huge problem with the HP verse and food. Where does the food come from? Why on earth are pumpkins your staple vegetable? Do you have *more* creatures like the oppressed house-elves that are even LESS worthy of freedom slaving away in some hidden pureblood's fields somewhere in England? Because honestly I can't see Lucius Malfoy telling Draco how to plant corn and harvest beans, and the rich are *clearly* the landholders in this world.
I have had loooong conversations about the world building in HP. If the wizards of the UK wear robes ("traditonal" clothing?) do the wizards of Polynesia wear extravagant grass skirts regularly? And who decided that robes were traditional? Can't we have some wizards who are SUPER old school and want to run about in fur and leather just covering their danglies?
and actually, I was always a little thrown by how the very first book, Redwall, started with Cluny and his crew jumping off a cart being pulled by a crazed horse. No other reference of larger animals after that ever. I guess we just assumed that we had some species that were dedicated to stealing milk from humans? Squirrels, maybe? I never trusted those cute twitchy noses.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-26 04:41 pm (UTC)Corn and beans? Pfft! Those are not British! Neither are pumpkins. As to pumpkins, They're all the more glaring to me, because I'm extremely allergic to them, and so I'm trained to notice them in real life, which bleeds over into fiction, so it's good to know I'm not the only one going "pumpkins, WTF?" Pumpkin juice especially. Pumpkins are starchy, and starchy things do not make good juice. And they aren't exactly sweet or tart. The taste would be kind of bland.
For food more generally, especially since we see a lot of it out of season, I assumed that because it looks like the Wizarding world is very small and most of it works for the Ministry (I'm basing this on class size and the number of witches and wizards we see) that either British taxes go to pay for the Ministry, and that money is used to buy food and other raw materials, which is sold to Wizarding store owners for Galleons, which are used to pay Ministry employees, which then buy the food and assorted other goods. Or that there's some kind of magical theft going on of muggle resources that nobody talks about, and muggles don't notice because it's small scale. Hey, when authors don't explain how the characters get food, I'm free to make up my own explanation.
As to the robes, I bet that when Europe colonized much of the rest of the world, the European Wizarding culture did its best to undermine the local Wizarding groups, and thus the countries where people dress in mostly Westernized clothes today probably wear robes. I like the grass skirt image better.
I'd forgotten about the horse! External to the story, I suspect that Brian Jacques didn't have all the worldbuilding worked out yet in Redwall, and so things like the horse are remnants of that. The story nut in me is already starting to wonder if instead of there being humans, there are talking horses and other large animals out there, who have somehow overcome their lack of opposable thumbs much like the rodents to become picturesque farmers. Maybe the abbey has a milk buying agreement? Neither theft nor this would work though, as much was made during sieges of the Abbey's self sufficiency.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-29 02:09 am (UTC)I can only suppose the HP wizarding world, is based on Halloween trappings: pumpkin juice because pumpkins are a Halloween icon, cats and owls the only pets or familiars, robes and pointy hats because those spell "witch" in the popular imagination. I am only bewildered that an obvious take-off on a very British genre, by a British writer, picks up the fancy-dress trappings of this Americanized holiday. The wizarding world as a construct more or less ignores the traditions behind All Hallows Eve or any of its analogs, and simply sports the most commercial version of Halloween and "horror" imagery.
Maybe I'm misreading something here, being familiar with American Halloween and only passingly with British supernatural traditions. But that's what it looks like, especially in the earlier books where the setting is essentially the comic relief to a traditional storyline.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-29 02:24 am (UTC)I think the Americanized Halloween has become the standard English one too, at least my English aunt talks about what her family did for it, and it sounds a lot like what we do in the states.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-31 10:40 am (UTC)When you have tried to make a jack-o-lantern out of a swede, or, heaven help us, a traditional potato or turnip, as we did when I was a kid in the 70's, pumpkins become a luxury good. They are huge! They are brightly coloured! You can easily scoop out the insides with a spoon (no hacking away with a sharp knife and cutting your fingers or accidentally making a hole). Magic! Until, oooh, the mid-80s they were quite hard to get hold of too - if you were the local child whose parents had secured a pumpkin, that was something of a coup. And American Halloween - it's safe, it's friendly, it's dressing up and going out with your friends. It is not (from a British perspective) genuinely scary or upsetting or dangerous.
A Harry Potter where the wizarding world was entirely based on British Halloween traditions would be a very different and much darker place, I think - probably not the kind of place Harry would see as an amazing alternative to his miserable Muggle existence.
I don't really have a problem with Harry Potter pumpkins: they don't seem to behave or taste like our Muggle pumpkins, so I'd assumed some enterprising wizard - perhaps a Herbology specialist, we know they have botanical sciences - had developed a range of magical pumpkins with amazing new flavours and nutritional qualities. Similar to what Muggles have done with the tomato, only with magic to take it much further.
I doubt Draco or Lucius have to do anything hand-on to do with actual agriculture, any more than a Muggle aristocrat would, but that doesn't mean they don't have people working for them. Perhaps they have self-managing magical market gardens, or employed magician gardener/farmers? Although we mostly meet professional wizards, there are others about - staff for the Knight Bus, for example, and the lady that pushes the trolly on the Hogwarts Express.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-31 06:08 pm (UTC)Also, it doesn't explain why it seems like most of the small population works in the Ministry.